Does Your Organization Extract Enough Value from Valuable Data?
“Half my advertising spend is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
Business pioneer John Wanamaker’s legendary quip, now more than a century old, is ready for a reboot. Today, at many organizations, the real puzzle is wasted data.
In sectors including finance, manufacturing, telecoms, and pharma and healthcare, many organizations struggle to manage their ever-increasing volume of data and convert it into insights that help them innovate, create value, and lead their competition—in essence, to turn their big data into big decisions.
Call it the “data paradox”: 67% of organizations in a recent Forrester study*, commissioned by Dell Technologies, said they need more data than their capabilities can provide, yet 70% are already bringing in data faster than they can process and analyze it. The pandemic has only intensified this dilemma as the growing on-demand economy generates more data for organizations whose skills, culture, and infrastructure cannot always keep up.
To tap its greater utility, organizations need to rescue their data from traditional silos and legacy infrastructure and share it widely, opening the way to greater predictive accuracy and more meaningful discoveries. Achieving all this requires implementing new end-to-end technology and services.
Data Novices and Data Champions
While six in 10 organizations agree that an as-a-service (aaS) model would help them become more agile, and scale, only two in 10 have migrated most of their applications and infrastructure to aaS systems. More than half of companies are “data novices,” drowning in their own data; only a few “data champions” are extracting the insights they need from multi-cloud and aaS models and from processing data at the edge.
For data novices, the risks of keeping legacy processes and technology in place are significant. Organizations that cannot generate data-based innovations and strategies risk losing market share to rivals that know their audiences and can improve the customer experience (CX) because they can see, distribute, and integrate their real-time data.
Data champions create data-driven cultures and boost their competitive edge by democratizing data: breaking down internal barriers and bottlenecks to motivate their workforces, inviting more employees to make critical data-based decisions. Cloud-based aaS data models can also help these organizations boost their data security while lowering the costs of data storage.
Here is how two organizations became data champions.
Speed, Accuracy, Reliability
Healthcare company Medacist helps hospitals and healthcare professionals apply artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and analytics to data and uncover unusual patterns in drug distribution at every stage.
To support latency-sensitive analytical and AI workloads faster and more reliably, the company replaced its fragmented legacy infrastructure with a private cloud-based platform running software-as-a-service (SaaS). This migration helped Medacist cut data processing times and deliver noticeably faster and more accurate analysis.
Delivering analytics that once needed a 24-hour turnaround now takes five minutes. The infrastructure’s greater reliability meets clients’ strict requirements, upholding service level agreements’ 99.99% uptime guarantee, which saves Medacist millions of dollars in fees. This greater speed, accuracy, and reliability has proved critical to Medacist’s expansion of its customer base from 600 providers to more than 2,000.
Speed, Accuracy, Reliability
Great Little Box Company, a small packaging-materials manufacturer in Vancouver, determined its legacy forklift IT infrastructure was underperforming by clogging up data that kept the company from responding to customer demands, creating innovative designs, and efficiently producing and delivering its inventory.
To connect the data from its factory-floor machinery directly to its sales and service team, GLBC introduced aaS-powered enterprise resource planning (ERP) technology that enhanced its IT infrastructure’s performance: a key improvement in a competitive sector.
After GLBC selected an integrated modular solution, its IT partner installed and deployed the ERP infrastructure within 48 hours. The changes upgraded the company’s data-center computing, storage, and networking resources—and helped lead to performance increases of up to 100%.
Shifting to this system also led to other economic and sustainability gains, as GLBC eliminated the significant demands of powering and cooling its standalone servers. “We rely on it day-to-day to streamline our business processes, from sales to the factory floor,” said Sorel Apreutesei, GLBC’s IT manager.
Making Your Data Work for You
John Wanamaker may have been comfortable wasting half his ad spend, but your organization cannot afford to waste half your data. Tapping data for the business insights that can improve the experiences of your employees and your customers will mean shifting from an infrastructure that bottles it up.
Adopting an agile aaS data-driven infrastructure can help your organization remove these barriers and turn data into insights, so your business can uncover once-hidden opportunities and become a market-leading data champion.
Learn more about the Dell solutions that can help your organization use your data to its fullest.
*A May 2021 commissioned study, “Unveiling Data Challenges Afflicting Businesses Around The World”, conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Dell Technologies. Base: 4,036 Director+ decision-makers responsible for data and data strategies in NA, EMEA, APJ, GC, or LATAM